The present invention relates to the encoding of moving pictures which are successively received from a television camera or the like and the recognition and interpretation of such moving pictures and, more particularly, to a method and apparatus for detecting three-dimensional motions and variations in the shape of a three-dimensional object in moving pictures.
To analyze three-dimensional motions of an object in a moving picture, that is, to detect its three-dimensional motion parameters, is an important technique in the fields of a three-dimensional motion compensated prediction, robot vision, etc. for the detection of a motion of a human head at the transmitting side in intelligent image coding of a moving picture of a face, video telephone, and so forth.
Heretofore, there has been known a method which utilizes an apparent velocity vector between frames for obtaining three-dimensional motion parameters of an object from temporally succeeding frames ("On the computation of motion from sequences of images-A review," Proc. IEEE, Vol. 76, No. 8, pp 917-935, August 1988).
However, the prior art system has a defect in that the estimation of three-dimensional motion and the detection of configurational changes cannot accurately be achieved.